Robert Mockler’s Like Me is an unshakable film. Here is an aggressive, often angry assault on our desperate desire to connect in the age of likes, follows, and retweets. Concerned with the cinema of isolation, Mockler partnered with genre legend Larry Fessenden (Habit, Wendigo) and actress Addison Timlin (Little Sister) to produce a visually visceral descent into the psyche of the social media obsessed. Not quite Natural Born Killers, the crime spree of Like Me is a pulsating and painful conversation surrounding our Information Age addiction.

‘Like Me’ peers into dark corners of anti-social media

“Like Me” makes a case for describing one corner of the web as anti-social media, in that the need to connect online can send certain souls toward ever-darker impulses. (Logan Paul, pay attention.)

In this woolly, weird portrait of maladjusted loneliness, Addison Timlin plays Kiya, a pixie-ish, peripatetic, thrill-seeking millennial who turns phone-captured encounters with fringe denizens of the night — a convenience store clerk who thinks he’s being held up, a homeless man she plies with food — into squirrelly online content designed to stoke responses from fans and trolls alike.

Her crime spree takes a turn when she lures a skeevy middle-aged motel owner (indie horror stalwart Larry Fessenden, who also produced) into a costumed sex scenario involving junk food, torture and kidnapping, but that morphs into a perversely emotional connection over their separate statuses as outsiders. Perhaps realizing his setup is intriguing if dramatically thin, writer-director Robert Mockler deploys a healthy skill with Kubrick-torqued visual experimentation — interjected video installations — that keep the tension up and the psychological terrain appealingly destabilized.

Both impish and melancholy, with Timlin and Fessenden handily shifting the molecules in the air each time they share a scene, “Like Me” has an eccentric bravura to it. It’s like an artisanal cocktail of modern-day danger, pain and alienation: whether it wants you to sip or gulp, it finds its way into your head.

Despite a long resumé as a producer, director, and actor, Larry Fessenden isn’t exactly a household name, outside of diehard horror circles. Fessenden, however, always has the larger world in mind. His mostly low-budget movies all incorporate larger themes alongside the scares. Fessenden acts in and produces Like Me, in which a young woman named Kiya (Addison Timlin) causes a firestorm of controversy via line-crossing prank videos. It’s the first feature from writer/director Robert Mockler, and Fessenden took on the project via his company, Glass Eye Pix. We spoke with Fessenden about bringing new filmmakers under his wing, the role social media plays in our lives, and how this year’s Academy Awards is part of a changing perception of horror movies on a whole.

We’re excited to host a livestream Q&A with Like Me director Robert Mockler and genre icon Larry Fessenden that will be moderated by our own Matt Donato. The event will begin at 8:20 pm ET, so make sure to be on our Facebook page to catch the action!

I once read a treatment for a music video proposed by some experimental filmmakers. Their work seemed to defy words, so in the description, they simply wrote: “Never boring! Always interesting!” This is how I might partially sum up Robert Mockler’s directorial debut, Like Me, a vomit of color, sound, strobes and milk — milk? Yes, milk — centered on a young woman, Kiya (Addison Timlin), who becomes addicted to the thrill of recording people humiliating themselves and then uploading the videos to her website.

Mockler seems to be striving for profound revelations about human connection (or lack thereof) in the digital age, but in a fiction that kind of meaning best comes from character rather than circumstance. (See: Ingrid Goes West). Still, Timlin so fully embodies the role of the sociopathic Kiya that this often-gruesome buffet of wild imagery bathed in hot pink impresses even with a thin, nearly nonexistent story. And Mockler’s and Jessalyn Abbott’s artfully chaotic editing style, full of ultra-slow dissolves, double exposures and scrubbed footage playing forward and backward in time like the image is possessed, elevates Like Me to video art.

Online media provides no cure for disaffection in “Like Me,” a formally eclectic journey into the dark heart of a twenty something girl who uploads videos of her criminal activity. Debut filmmaker Robert Mockler uses this premise for an impressionistic portrait of modern estrangement, using all manner of stylistic devices to capture his protagonist’s tumultuous psyche. The film’s lack of a traditional narrative will no doubt alienate many, but for the more adventurous, it offers a uniquely weird take on loneliness and lunacy.